Dare I, I ask,
Place light there‘pon
The glare of eyes?

Dare I disturb?
Dare I, remote,
Make time for life,
No absence moaped?
Dare I define
And be r’fined?
Timidity
Not be for me?

Dare I select
Many a dress
All for brides
Who count down time?

Dare I, dare cough
Within your cup?
Dare I, dare kiss
The tender cheek?
Dare I, for sickness
And for health,
Put off the flames
Of blithering?

What has brought the lowly one low,
What meandering thoughts, and what does he know?
What a life fraught with tragedy, woe,
What dismal plot to this poor man’s show?

The laborer staring and coldly he stares,
What is it, the limelight, the graying of hairs?
The soothing of rapture within sweet despair?
The timid ignoble ones laughing in corners,
Throwing their lots for the counting of days,
The days counting down till’ the noble man flounders,
Founting up life out in sweet love’s decay.

Ignoble ignoble they rash do scorn,
“Trouble, trouble, this man’s forlorn!
How do we tap him, how do we stop?
How do we privilege him out every drop?
How do we take him for furthest life’s course,
The limiting octave to settle his score?
How do we push him out to that edge,
And batter his brain with our dusty pledge:
‘So let it be written so let it be done,
And let not the better one have all the fun.’”

Thus laughing maniacally pledge do they speak,
Besmirching the fearful and shaming the weak.
Yet mind for cold recollection he calls,
Looking back to himself the lowly one maws,
He to his eating, his dinner, he paws,
Straightened the center of life and its jaws.

Death, O’ you all consuming notion:
Idea; intractable, implacable void.
As you are I see not clearly yet
I see a life made up of the stuff of myth.
With the narrow thinking of a man—
Achaean footsoldiers marching to glory—
I ponder your immensity, think
Not too clearly for the sake of sanity,
Because in fact I can think no more clearly.

For your sake, I say, I have wandered.
I have traveled dust and roads that stretch lifetimes
And that capture moments fleeting in
From great dusty horizons beyond the brink.
The dust, I think, I speak of last,
The road I speak of first.
Yet in no particular order is life
So constrained; nor, by consequence, is death.

Yet O’, to you, I give my all,
My heart, my fear, anguish and pain, I give all to you,
If only to supplicate you at the knees, say
“I am not ready yet, do not rip up the void.”
Yet O’, do you laugh, and you do,
And a pity it is that I be at your knees,
For you are a wand’ring, indiscriminate beast,
And you take life as you may please.

Raise an auspicious eye to the venerable shape.
His head is there, but hollow eyes
Do make up the void of his sight.
And a sinister look is there.
Raise an auspicious eye to the undark’ned mirror;
The eyes show a deep glist’ning light,
From deepest and remotest corners,
Where life is not that way.

It were perhaps too good to preen,
This thing, this much elided stream,
To rest therewith, tremulous ream
Of thoughts forthwith from misery.

Let not the beggar hear my words:
There is no hope in timely dress;
World it cares not for men deferred
From caring press and relatives.
Too much it cares for common things,
A word said soft, need not for pain,
Yet broken in its gleaning thoughts,
Suff’ring not well deserved stains.

These things, I say, they cast a sea
Before dim eyes, make blind men cry,
Rob their sight, ev’n in sight’s drought;
This I say, casts little more t’me.

I am a moment captured at the bottom of a glass.
I am the tempered mellow gold there sinking as sand
As the sun d’scends.
I am the fomenting film rippling ‘round the edges
Of tap’ring bubble gases amassing and trapped there
As the ice melts.

Glass press, to face and chest;
Bless the fresh new faces met,
Lest pleasant stings, with thoughtful crests
Of white breasted shores, drive thee to bet.

Wander old reminiscent highways,
Find blessed staring people there
Enjoying timid byways
With bronze and gorgon hair.

A mare lunar darkness
Dribbles from their glaring sight;
These good people with blue starkness
Emanating from their pupil light.

I see them now with faces, freshest faces
All anew; the thoughtful ones cry naked,
The new ones sigh to you.

I sat with you upon the lawn.
It was a marvelous day, you do remember?
There was so much good for us t’fawn
So much life for us to squander.
Yet a moment is brief, and life still shorter,
We had not time to wait upon us.
The sun was already falling, and the day
Must come to an end.

Ask not the name of the man who speaks here.
He has traveled the long dusty way, and
Through pastures sought the better life and the
Way that is not broad, but narrow, unsought,
And travailing yes I say that I have
Come to this, now, that you may, unto me,
Ask the undying question that is of
The everyman and his suitors many.

For I say unto you, I have witnessed the breaches of man’s will,
And have bought talent with shrill motion.
I have sauntered upon the long dusty way, and I say to you
It is not what it figures, appears not
As it seems to me, yet I long the toes of my feet through its dust,
Admire the gentle gleams that aspire
To godhead like me, to Sunlight with crystal formations and dust,
And longing have I perspired here
Long hours in the midnight drone, and have bought with cheap glass the fire
That is promised only to the man who has nothing.

This I say to the longing, the begging, the thieves,
The stealing conniving and prattling on like
Bees in the springtime, honeybees so forgetful,
So lusting after the next flower, to make good
On the oaths of children and fathers, to find that
No oath could be so magnificent, no oath could
Make good what thing the sailing Odysseus sought,
Might have sought were he of godlier kind, might have
Heeded were he not of the atrocious living
You and me, but so we are and so we must contend,
Contend with the flesh and the life and the death, the
Longing, the dribbling, the hours ill spent, to find
Not to find, and to live not to live, best
It seems to you and me, prattling and squandering
Life for the grave, with little time left: Such are we made.

A fool I say, this is a fool I see.
A fool staring, he knowing all he sees;
Eyes beholding immensity,
Perishing.

He grasps the fundamental things,
The first things, the primal things;
Primordial shape of egg, this shell
He sees, he the shape knows all too well.
Flittering here and there the chime
Of interfering patterns of light,
He measures with his instruments.
This he grasps and knows them all too well,
Knows the shape he sees, that basic
All to tell; he shapes the mirror
Images and breaks up all the chimes;
He knows it now, so basic now
It moves in sinuous abstractness,
So dull and so plain.

Sing, beloved, blessed, with boldness!
Sing to the causes of life and love,
Sing to the hoary stars above;
Such grace to bestow our promise!

Not without misery, pain, or woe,
Sing to the blackness and make it unso!
Sing to the absence of memory, time,
Sing to the love, the rhythm, the rhyme!

Sing, my beloved, to countless regrets;
Sing to the face of cold harbor chills;
Sing beneath arbors of turbulent skies;
Sing above witness, without claim distilled!
Sing to the freedom, that which we find,
Kept off and distant, no notion of time,
No more hubristic than a solemn man’s rhyme,
No more than a mystic foretelling sublime.
Sing above apathy, sing above pain,
Sing beneath empathy, lowly with shame,
Sing at the level of the beggar and call
That solitary banter which draws us all.

O' life, 'tis best that you speak not thy thoughts too quickly,
And you do.